Thursday, September 25, 2014

Well, a lot has happened. Actually,
since I last posted anything about our lives, a whole lifetime has
happened, it seems like. Technically, the last time I posted anything
about our life was back in January, when I laid out our plans for
2014. It's now... nearly 10 months later.

Long story short – We moved out of
Maine, are living in the Rosewood House and are starting to get
things on track for the holidays and get our family in gear for life.

Long story long... it was a tremendous
challenge for us to get to where we are. Virtually everything that
could go wrong, did. But virtually everything that could go
disastrously wrong went okay for us, so there's that at least.

After a lot of work and research, we
decided that the best thing we could do to get our family moved back
to Idaho was to get Linz and the kids out there with the Element and
most of our stuff, then I would fly back to Maine, do some home
improvement stuff, sell the trailer and drive to Idaho in the Fit.

The first part went pretty smooth,
though we ended up not leaving the state until later in the year than
planned. The drive was nice, though long. Hating the idea of a week
of interminable driving on interstates, we cut south and took Highway
50 most of the way, through West Virginia, the Midwest, over the
mountains in Colorado and up through Utah to Idaho. If you are
planning a trip cross country, I very highly recommend this route if
you have the time. It takes an extra day or two, but it is so much
more relaxed and has more character in fifty miles than 500 miles of
interstate travel. We ate BBQ, wandered remote campsites and
generally enjoyed ourselves as much as possible considering how much
was left looming over our heads.

As for our stuff? That's a whole
'nother blog, my friends. We shipped it using Uhaul's U-Box service,
where you load the box, they load it on a truck and deliver it to
your nearest U-Haul. Something that, while slightly more expensive
than towing a trailer is more than compensated for in convenience and
gas money. Or it would have been if u-Haul hadn't lost our box, been
unable to provide even a semblance of customer service on any end of
the ordeal and finally delivered our shop products and house a week
or so later. Ugh.

But we had our stuff, in a big pile in
the in-law's garage, Linz and the kids were firmly installed in their
basement, my mom was working on moving out and I flew back to Maine.
Despite taking pretty good care of the trailer, it was a trailer all
the same. Things degrade so fast in a mobile home and after a few
years, there was a surprising amount of little things that needed
repaired. Soft spots on floors, re-painting, replacing some damaged
linoleum. At the same time, we ran our shops from two parts of the
country.

If you ever have the opportunity to live 3,000 miles
from your family in a super isolated location with no friends and try
to run a shop from there and out in the other location at the same
time, while dealing with money woes and home improvement, politely
decline. It was terrible. I'm not planning on reliving it here, but
suffice it to say that I experienced some of the darkest times and
lowest creative ebbs of my life in that trailer.

Eventually, repairs complete and plans
made, we convinced the lawnlords to buy our trailer where it was, so
that they could rent it out and I wouldn't have to find someone to
move it. The deal was not perfect, we'd end up owing an additional
$2k on the trailer and we had to wait for the bank. Which, it seems,
in Maine consists of conceiving and raising a person from birth to
then sign the loan papers. It took forever. The whole time, I stewed
in a nearly empty house, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, unsure
of when I could actually leave.

The news of an approval finally came a
scant hour before the bank closed in the middle of July. I'd already
had my car loaded with the last of my gear, save a few essentials. As
soon as I got the call, I hopped in the car, drove to town, signed
over the trailer and left the state of Maine. Possibly forever.

The drive to Idaho wasn't quite as fun
this time, despite taking the same general route. I was in a smaller
car that wasn't quite as fun to drive for long distances and more
vitally, it was stuffed FULL. It was so loaded that at one point I
actually had to unload it and eliminate some heavier items because
the body was dragging too close to the tires for safety. I could
slightly recline my seat if nothing shifted, but sleeping was next to
impossible and there were no funds for motel rooms. I pretty much
loaded up audio books and podcasts and drove non-stop.

Once I got back to Pocatello, things
started moving at warp speed. We helped finish moving my mom and
brother out of the Rosewood House, threw our stuff in and started
getting our poor neglected shop back up and running. Earlier in the
year we had started attending comic cons and we wanted to continue
that and Christmas would be here sooner than imaginable.

But we were back in our house. For the
first time in a long time, possibly ever, we were living in a place
that we planned to intentionally live for the next 5-10 years of our
lives. No crazy plans running constantly about leaving, no half
unpacked rooms in prep for a motel, none of that.

The house needs a lot of work.
Foundation work, new roof, deep cleaning, new floor coverings, yard
work galore, but it's our home. For better or worse, and we plan to
make it better.

And I know I've said this before, but
I'm hoping to start updating this blog regularly with our adventures
again. I'm likely re-directing most of our other blogs to this one
and condensing all of my interests here at the ROUS Motel. It might
make for a more eclectic page, but it should be a livelier one too.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

For the last few years my wife and I have been selling our
handmade décor and geeky stuff on Etsy, an online marketplace. What is the
first thing people ask us when they find out that’s what we do for a living?
Not “What’s the shop?” or “Ooh, what do you sell?” No, it’s almost invariably
something like “I make things too… I should do that. How do I do that?” (Though
sometimes it’s the variation – “I make things and would like you to sell them
for me.”)

Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t offended by these questions,
not at all. We feel incredibly fortunate to be able to make a living (mostly) from
our arts and we want to do everything we can to help every person we know do
the same. The only problem is the misconception about running your own business
selling things you create yourself – it is INCREDIBLY TIME CONSUMING. Many
people, when they hear you work from home for yourself assume you spend half
the day surfing the net and the other half napping. In reality, the two of us spend
well over 70-80 hours a week working on some aspect of our business and there’s
constantly some little detail or project that is waiting impatiently for us to
get to it. My average day starts with making a to-do list that usually runs to
about 20-30 items, ranging from “Email about shipment” – a two minute job, to “Individually
hand paint and heat treat the words Lumos and Nox on 150 switchplates” A job
that can take 9 hours of constant work.

So in lieu of trying to help everyone that asks and not
actually having the time to be much help, we decided a quick series of How-To
blogs would be a great way to guide people down the path of creating their own
online self-employed empire.

The plan is to post 4 blogs, each outlining a specific
aspect of selling on Etsy and other online sources. However, I tend to babble
and that may expand to a number of additional sub-blogs.

So if you don’t have the patience to read all of them and
want to know the five most important things about selling on Etsy, here they
are –

CREATE SOMETHING YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT

If you plan to make a living off of these products, you will
end up making a ridiculous number of them and talking a lot about them with
people. If you don’t like what you make or are just doing it because it will
sell, not only will it become apparent that you aren’t passionate about it, but
it won’t actually be any fun to do.

CREATING IS A VERY SMALL PORTION OF RUNNING AN ONLINE SHOP

Like, depressingly small. Most of your time will be spent
writing, taking care of customers, dealing with problems, shipping things,
taking photos and research.

80% OF A SUCCESSFUL ONLINE SHOP OWNER’S TIME WILL BE SPENT RESEARCHING

This is not an exaggeration at all, especially in the
beginning. You will have to research everything – how to run the site, how to
word the listing, what tags to use, what tags are, what others are selling,
what they are selling for, etc, etc, etc. The second you get tired of
researching and adapting, you stop being successful. The people that have asked
for help from us immediately get a list of about a hundred things to go and
research.

RESEARCH EVERYTHING

I’m not kidding here.

DO NOT ANTICIPATE SUCCESS.

It’s a waste of your time and will only lead to
disappointment. There are currently over six hundred and forty thousand active
shops on Etsy – that’s shops with items currently available for sale. There are
more than a million registered shops and more than twenty five million items
available for sale on Etsy right now. Even if you spend the time required to
research every aspect of your shop, have a unique and innovative product and
spend all the time you can to create an ideal shop and business, you may still
never sell anything. It’s as simple as that. It took us two years and hundreds
of items before we started building a following and found the right items for
us. Some will find that faster, others never will. This is another reason why
you need to make something you are passionate about. At least you will love
what you make.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Over the past few weeks I've had an unusual number of people ask me about resources for publishing their own work and I figured rather than cutting and pasting the response to everyone, I'd make a blog I could send people to.

Obviously, this is far from complete and I'm not going into extreme depth on most things in this blog, maybe later ones. This is just a list of essential steps for getting your creation into people's hands.

Step One

Write something. This is the obvious one and we'll assume you've written a novel, done a few drafts and figured it's ready to go. It's also important to note that this something should be written in a decent editing program. The more familiar you are with it and it's functions the easier and more professional everything will be. Word is great. OpenOffice also works. (And is Free )

Go back over it. Unfortunately, most aspiring authors can't afford professional editing or proofreading. If you know someone that can do it effectively, or is willing to do it on the cheap, cherish that person and never let them go. This is the first place we will spend real money on if we are ever making any of said money.

For any said novel, we typically write 2-3 drafts, do a thorough edit and proofread, then pass it off to the other person who does the same. Then we print it and do the same thing in paper form. And still miss things. Rules, odd spelling things, Simple mess-ups... Linz is especially bad with homonyms. There's nothing worse than publishing a book with english errors or spelling mistakes, but there's also only so much you can do without hiring a pro. Which will cost you. Hundreds, most likely.

On the bright side, most readers of your work will be aware that your book isn't from a major publisher and unless it's a particularly egregious error, are willing to cut you some slack. But do the best you can. In addition to the usual functions like spellcheck and grammar, we use a program called ProWritingAid. It's an online site that allows you to paste a block of text and it analyzes it a few dozen different ways. Overused words, phrases, spelling, weird rules. It's really nice. You can also pay for it to be used as a widget in Word itself, which is really convenient and quite useful.

Step Two

Decide how you want people to read your book and where. The two major choices are physical books and as an eBook. (Naturally, you can post it online as a blog and what have you.... ) We like our novels to be available as both physical paperback novels and ebooks, but be warned, the physical copy is a LOT more work than making an ebook. For the purposes of this blog, We'll concentrate on making an ebook. Maybe I'll do a follow up on paperbacks. However, if you are interested, we use CreateSpace to make ours. It's run by Amazon, has full integration with them and most of their steps are really easy to follow. They run a print on demand service and you can order books yourself at cost.

As for where people can find your book, that's trickier. Realistically, the best way to reach the most people is to have your book on as many sites as humanly possible. That means publishing your book on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble as well as sites like the Kobo store, Apple, etc.

However - Each of those stores require different formatting of the manuscript, separate accounts, different hoops and rings of fire to navigate. They even care about how you tab your manuscript and how many fonts you use. You can publish on all of them and more however. It's just a lot of work.

There's another catch too. Amazon.com, the obvious big daddy leader in eBooks thanks to the Kindle has a program with perks available to the author that chooses to e-pub exclusively through them. They let you run promotions, give away free books, discount books to people that own the physical copy, swell stuff like that.

We've tried it both ways and right now, we find that we get better exposure and results from being exclusive to Amazon than we did being on all of the sites. That may change as our bibliography expands and we can build a base of readers outside of the kindle, but for now we publish exclusively there. For those wondering, you can read Amazon books on other devices, it just takes a number of extra steps. I made a tutorial about it HERE. (Which is older and may be out of date.) I own a nook, and I can understand wanting to be on more than just Amazon. I'll get into the other sites at a later date. (Probably)

Step Three

Okay, so we are going to publish an eBook on Amazon.com, and not worry about the other sites and options. The first step is to go to kdp.amazon.com and log in. You can use your amazon.com sign in or create a new one for your publishing empire. KDP is the world of tools for the aspiring self-pubbed author. Not only does it get you the best exposure, the site is well laid out and walks you through things simply and intelligently (For the most part) I'll make another post later on the exact steps of publishing on KDP, but in all honesty, you probably don't need it. Just click on the yellow button labeled "Add new title" and start making a book!

If I were you, however, I would click on the Help button on the top of the page. When there, Click on, download and print the entire guide titled "Building Your Book For Kindle" not only will this walk you through each of the steps, it explains the trickier stuff, like spacing, tabs and tables of contents in a way that anyone can do it. It's a very nice guide that I still refer back to every time.

That alone should be enough to get your book into someone's digital reader. Not impossible, but it also looks misleadingly simple. There's a lot of little tricks and slang the process uses that can trip you up. Just remember to take your time and read the guides and help sections if you're stuck.

A Couple of Notes:

I would be terribly remiss if I didn't add a few things here that I think are incredibly important.READ OTHER BOOKS. Lots of them. Pay attention to how they lay things out, the way the page looks. What the front pages look like before the story starts. Especially books in the same genre as your work.

HAVE A GOOD COVER. As an artist, I concentrate on this a lot more than other people, I'm sure, but it is vital. With the tremendous amount of ebooks available, you MUST have some way to stand out before anyone ever gets around to reading your plot synopsis. Sending people to buy your book is all well and good, but if you can't get Average Joe to buy it, you'll never become successful. If you aren't artistic at all, you can still make a decent cover. Pay attention to color and font. Look at lots of covers. Browse Amazon's listings for similar books and see what they do on theirs that makes them successful. Remember that the first time your cover is seen it's less than an inch tall. That's important to note - some covers become a jumble of ugly at thumbnail size.

If at all possible, don't go the generic "Colored background with white words" route. They scream amateur. I read over 200 books a year usually, about half are self pubbed or independent and I have never bought one with a cover like that.

At the same time, neveruse an image you found online unless you bought it for your use. Anything on the internet, whether it says so or not, is protected by copyright. There are some sites that offer images for use, but be sure to check and make sure it's okay to use for commercial matters. Some sites look like they have free images, but it's only if they're used for editorial or non-profit reasons. If all else fails, take a picture and add your title to your own photograph. That's relatively easy with free programs like PhotoScape.

Another option is to hire someone to create a cover for you. We do that on our site Octopress Books where we make custom covers and have started selling template covers that we can add your title and name to a pre-made design for a lower price than our fully custom covers. NOTE: I didn't write this blog to plug our cover services, but I couldn't write this and not mention it, could I? :)

Believe in what you write.

Both before and after publishing your novel, you have to love what you write and what you are doing. People online can be cruel or mindless and that can result in some harsh criticism. My suggestion is to ignore reviews completely if possible. Or have a trusted friend read them and forward ones that are positive, uplifting or genuinely useful. Don't ever let the haters stop you from writing and loving the process and result. Most authors hate their first works. But you have to keep writing and improving.

(This post is being cross-posted to our other blogs, so I apologize if it's redundant to my readers that follow all of them.)

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The more we think we have a plan figured out, the more
curves life seems to throw at us. A few months ago, we laid out our plans for
the rest of 2013 and our moves in 2014.It was a fine plan, but a number of major problems presented themselves. Our
house in Idaho was severely under-appraised due to a bunch of foreclosures in
the area, making it worth less than we actually owed on it. That's a situation
that will likely improve, eventually, but for the time being, that means my mom
buying it would be a bad move for both her and us. She could get a better house
in the area for less money than our place and find one that would suit her
needs better. We'd end up losing over $30k if we sold now. On top of that, our
Christmas was dramatically worse than we'd predicted. Between the government
shutdown, a late Thanksgiving and a myriad list of other reasons, people
weren't shopping as heavily as predicted. Our shop wasn't doing itself any favors
either. Apart from our soaps, which we'd debuted too late to really get the
full benefit, we didn't have anything new and exciting to draw in shoppers.

After we'd gotten the news of the house, I made a trip out
there and we decided that the best option would be for Lindsay and I to move
back to Idaho, to our old home on Rosewood. That would mean forgoing our plans
to move to Washington, but it wasn't all bad news. We still like the house on
Rosewood, we just never really gave it a chance. The whole time we lived there,
we were looking for plans to move away. Which is really how we've spent the
last... seven years or more, actually.

The initial plan had been to sell the trailer and abandon
Maine as soon as the holidays were over, traveling south to avoid the weather
and get back to Idaho in late January. It would mean us losing money on this
trailer, selling it as fast as we could, just to get out of here, the exact
reasoning that had kept us here before but this time it was compared to how
much we would lose if we sold the house... a number nearly twice as large.

Unfortunately, the holidays underperformance now means that
is delayed. We will have to wait until at least spring, when we can sell the
house at closer to what we owe and in the meantime I can concentrate on the
shop, conventions and possibly a part time job, while Lindsay re-dedicates
herself to writing. (Despite not releasing a book in over a year, her romance
novels are still selling regularly if not in great numbers)

So this is kind of a non-update. But despite the setbacks,
we are actually quite excited about the next few months. It would be more
exciting if we were moving back to Poky and better still if our original plans
of Washington were possible, but we aren't rushing to escape Maine quite as
urgently and that should allow us some time to do it properly. Eat at Red's
Eats one more time, do some sightseeing and photography, I plan to hit a number
of conventions in the area. It should be good stuff.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Every year for Christmas, we get a new ornament. It's a tradition I've been doing since I was a little boy. When Lindsay and I started getting a tree together we started choosing an ornament as a family. I've been lax on updating this blog and as we were trimming the tree this year, it struck us how much we like having a diary of sorts on here. The ability to hop on and read about what we did on a certain day or, in this case, what ornament we bought a certain year. So ROUS is back. I hope. And to start, a rundown of ornaments past.

2004

Our first ornament together was a simple, pretty thing. Just a small glass star with blue glitter. We bought it at Pier One and it hung on a tiny tree in my basement apartment in Pocatello, ID.

2005

2005's ornament was keeping with the theme - a pretty, delicate glass piece with a bit of iridescence. We bought it at Pier One as well. I think we were in Missoula MT for this Christmas.

2006

For 2006, we couldn't find anything at Pier One we liked - they'd gone from delicate pretty things to big gaudy colored stuff. Pink and fuscia, etc. So we found this cute guy, made from porcelain and silver paint at Target. This was our first year in our new house in Pocatello, ID.

2007

We had a hard time finding an ornament we liked in 2007. We looked all over the place but between the trend leaning big and gaudy and the fact that we were pretty broke that year, we struggled. We finally found this goofy little fellow on a side panel tucked away in the back of a Target and though a bit silly, we like him a lot. He's only about an inch tall and made of metal with a glass bead.

2008

2008 was the year we decided to start making the ornaments more meaningful than just being pretty. We had discovered how much we loved the Pacific ocean and found this cute little articulated enamel and metal seahorse to commemorate it. This was also when we started looking into buying a motel in earnest. I have no idea where we bought it... maybe the aquarium in Newport?

2009

2009 was the year our ambition kind of got the better of us. optimistic about the prospect of leasing a motel in Washington, we chose this ornament which we found at a World Market in Boise, ID because well... it was money! haha. Turns out, that plan fell through and we ended up making much larger changes to our lives that coming year. We've yet to see that money, but it's still a pretty ornament.

2010

This ornament was chosen to represent our move to Maine in 2010. We also liked how it went well with our little seahorse guy. Kind of one for each coast. We bought this in a little jewelry store in Brunswick, ME. We were renting a trailer in Topsham, ME that year.

2011

2011 was our year of frugality. We tried to start paying down our debt and figure out what we were doing for our future. We had no idea how much would change in the next year. Lindsay made this ornament from wire and a bead, including the funky hanger. It's a cute little thing.

2012

Deeply Dapper changed our lives in 2012. Lindsay quit her job to run the shop in November and I retired from Walgreens after ten years in January. One of the main reasons we were able to was our tremendous sales of our Harry Potter themed light switch plates. So we designed and I made us this ornament, in the shape of the Harry Potter lightning bolt, cut from an actual switchplate. It's easily our cheapest ornament, but it signifies the largest change for us.

2013

This is our ornament for 2013. It's easily ouyr most expensive ornament, costing nearly $40, but well worth it. It's a Maine leaf, metalized in beautiful red-copper. We chose it because this will be our last year in Maine. Plans are in motion to move back to Idaho in January of 2014. (More on that in a future post.) This big, beautiful ornament will remind us of what we came to love about the east coast.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

I have been bad. Not just at updating this blog, but all of
our blogs, social media sites and in my own writing. It's literally been over a
month since I've written a single word on a novel and apart from some last
edits on the print version of MR PALE, Lindsay and I have been totally out of
the loop on the author end of our lives. There's an okay reason behind some of
it, but I feel bad all the same.

Part of the reason it aggravates me is that I genuinely like
writing, and I like positing on this blog. If nothing else, I actually think it
makes a great little record of our lives and right now our lives are different
than they've ever been.

I've said this before, but I'll say it again now – I'll try
and be better.

So what's been going on? A ton. This year has been amazing
for us in so many ways but in other facets it's actually been one of our
hardest years ever. The opportunity to quit my retail job and for both of us to
concentrate our efforts on Deeply Dapper and our various other pursuits has
been a dream come true. But True Life is never quite as sweet as the dream.
We've had some ROUGH months. Rough estimate, we need about $3000 a month in
income to pay bills, feed the animals and keep the shop going. There were a few
months in late spring/ early summer where we didn't make half that.

When I quit my job I did something somewhat ill-advised – I
cashed in my retirement fund from Walgreens. The simple fact is that if things
go the way we've planned, I could either use it now to work towards our future
or save it and give up our dreams right now. It was a no-brainer to us – we're
dreamers.

So that money has supported us at times and every time we sat
in the red and needed some new item for the shop or a big load of supplies that
had to come out of that savings, it sucked, pure and simple.

So there's that. Money troubles.

In addition, there's the sheer, unadulterated claustrophobia
of two people, two large dogs and two cats going from a 1600 square foot house
with a huge fenced yard, two sheds and a garage in Idaho to an 800 square foot
tin box in the middle of nowhere. Add in the fact that we're both here ALL of
the time and are at heart both very alone-time centric, this has been a Challenge.
We did what we could – we bought Linz a writing cottage and we cordoned off our
place into private zones but we live in a house that takes roughly twenty paces
to reach from one end to the other. It takes the dog less than a second to run
it.

After a few rough months of living here with the shop hitting
a few speed bumps, we made a fateful choice. We needed to get out of Maine.
Neither of us have any friends out here. Linz worked the overnight shift at a
hotel and I was most of my peers' boss at Walgreens. We don't socialize,
especially when we live 40 minutes from any socializing being done. And
naturally, both of our best friends are the types that aren't really functional online. I have a few friends that started as online so I had them and I've
always been rather content in solitude, but it was especially hard for Linz,
especially when it came to writing inspiration and motivation. There are some
things that friends can inspire and move along without ever realizing it.

Our plan to move was ambitious, no doubt. The real sticking
point was one of the same things pushing us to move in the first place – this
house. We bought it out here with the vague allusion that moving to rural Maine
would be a smart step company ladder-wise and at the time I bit. We got a
decent deal for the place but we still owed a lot on it and unlike a real
house, a mobile home is more like a car when it comes to resale. We were gonna
lose money. Probably a lot. Luckily, we didn't own the land, so we'd just have
to sell the trailer and WEST OR BUST.The plan was to wait for this coming Christmas, stockpile every penny we
could and as soon as the snow receded, get the Hell out of Derry Maine.

One of our home improvement projects, replacing a cracked floor joist.

Unfortunately, once we did the smart thing – Crunch Numbers,
things began to reveal themselves. Assuming we couldn't sell the trailer for
much and factoring the costs associated with the move – rentals, trailers, gas,
tolls, etc., it would cost us approximately $14,000. And that was just back to
Idaho, to say nothing of our ultimate goals of getting past the potato and into
the Pacific Northwest.

On the other hand, we actually had that much, give or take,
between our retirement money and what we forecasted to make over the holiday,
so it was doable.Then things got a bit
crappier out here. Maine seemed to close up over us and things seemed more
oppressive. We had a few trademark issues with the shop and just plain bad
months and we started to get desperate. We had to get out of Vacationland and
back West where our hearts were.

Part of it was that we were starting to crunch the numbers in
regards to this Christmas. Last year was huge for us and our shop was
significantly larger on a day to day basis now. Christmas could be HUGE. And we
knew no one out here. If we were to say.... head to Idaho BEFORE the holiday,
what would be stopping us from setting up shop in Linz's folks' garage and
hiring cheap slave labor under the guise of inviting friends and family over?It sounded so great. Eating Christmas cookies
and packaging switch plates with family and friends.

Enough that the idea seduced any other real logic out of our
heads for a while. We started looking at places to buy post-Christmas, figuring
out which supplies to buy now and have shipped to Idaho ahead of us...

Then, one day, we looked at each other and said “Crap, it's a
good thing we don't run our shop like we run our lives, or we'd be bankrupt.”

For us to get out to Idaho before Christmas, it would not
only take every penny of our savings, but we would likely have had to put all
of our Christmas supplies on the credit card that we had just spent two years
paying off. Additionally, we still owned our house in Idaho. My mom is working
towards buying it, but regardless of how the shop does, there's no way we could
buy a home in OR or WA while it was still in our name, especially with a new –
owner operated business as our sole income. We also had about three months to
sell everything in the house that wouldn't fit in a 5x8 trailer and get to
Idaho with enough time to prep for the holiday sales to start in October.

SO to sum up, we would be living in the In-Laws basement,
have thousands of dollars in debt, not a penny to our name, no way to buy a
house to live in and we would be living in Pocatello Idaho... again.

Despite the obvious, we still almost went for it. The day we
realized what we were doing was a very hard one for us. It was the same day we
realized that if the shop kept having sales the way they were, I'd have to get
a job before we left or our bills would tap out the money we'd need to get out
of the house in the first place and we'd be stuck here anyway.

On the other hand, if we stayed here in Maine, we'd be in a
house that's already being paid on, we'd have enough money in savings to get us
to Christmas, buy a few home stuff we really needed and all of our supplies.
We'd be in a place that we didn't....hate and we'd be better off
financially than we have ever been... Sort of, anyway – at the time, our shop
was still a question, but we figured that if worse came to worse, I could work
part time during the summer to get us comfortably by in the lean months.

So once again, we did what we do best – we changed our plans.
Sigh.

OUR NEW PLAN:

2013:

Deeply Dapper - Keep on trucking with Deeply Dapper on Etsy.
At the same time, explore alternate avenues of revenue with the brand – www.deeplydapper.com as well as shops on
Zibbet, Goodsmiths and eBay. Finally get DD.com up and running, including the
Octopress branch, offering eBook formatting and cover work. Start prepping for
Christmas '13 in earnest. Tighten up books and records, become an official
business entity. Possibly hire a part time assistant to help out.

Writing – Still write, but let it take a back burner to an
extent. We were trying to push it too much and our love of the craft was
suffering. Our planned books for 2013 have been pushed back. Unfortunately.

Location – Stay here in the tin can in Maine. Not the best
choice, but we've been working on making it more comfortable for us, doing some
improvements we've put off, decorating and the like. We've also started
exploring the area we live in slightly more.

The Crew – We found the boys a Day Care we could take them to
for trips and the like – the person we did have caring for them moved further
away and it wasn't fair to them or the dogs. More on that in a later post. On
Lindsay and my end, we aren't doing much to change our situation... not yet.
The simple fact is that we don't have time to find friends this time of year
-XMAS is upon us. We have visits from family this fall too! Linz's folks will
be here in about a week for 8 days and my brother makes his first trip to Maine
at the end of September.

Addendum – My brother's trip had originally been designed as
a bookend to the first leg of our move out West. The plan had been for him to
come out, spend a week then he and I would load up Linz's car and drive it
cross country with as much of our house as we could do without until the full
move. We were looking forward to the cross country trip too. With our move
cancelled, we're now planning to take the train back to Idaho, where I'll spend
a bit of time. (Hopefully completing the sale of the house.)

2014:

Obviously, a lot of these plans are tentative, based largely
on how our shop does over Christmas.

Deeply Dapper – DD goes CON! 2014 will see our shop
represented in Comic Cons! We aren’t sure how many, but our first con is this
November – in addition to our switch plates and stickers, we'll be selling our
new line of geeky soaps. Along the way, I'll also be hitting up comic, game and
video stores to see if they would be interested in selling our soaps at a
retail level. My plans this year are to expand the brand on a wholesale level.
Doing so could stabilize our shop to a tremendous extent. More on this to come!
If it doesn't pan out, I'll likely try out a few part time jobs over the summer
to supplement our income. There have always been jobs I've been vaguely curious
about – this would be the ultimate chance to try them out.

Writing – Hopefully, Linz will be able to continue plugging
away at her romance novels – despite no new releases or promotions, her novels
keep selling, so we want to add to it. We also plan to release them in
paperback. She's also working on a top secret novel series that she's been
planning for a long time. We're also looking into writing groups in the area, both
from an editorial assistance point of view and for that sweet, sweet human
contact. I hope to release GRAVES and write the second MR PALE and MOONSTONE
BAY novels. I HOPE. Ha-ha

We also hope to find time to start e3njoying the area the way
a young work at home couple should be able to – Sex in the forest! Oh, I mean
exploring the hundreds of old graveyards out here!Our wholesale and conventions should be a
help here, allowing us to phase out some of the extremely time intensive
products from the shop.

The other thing is to pay off the house if possible so that
when the move does come, it comes much, much cheaper.

The Crew – Our two main goals here are to free our minds from
the stress of moving and where we'll be in a month, etc... And concentrate on
enjoying our lives. We're finally making money off our interests and talents –
we should be overjoyed! Linz will look for some friends; I'll be better about
talking with mine. We'll get out more, be healthier, cook even better food, and
lose weight.

The one event we are over the moon about in 2014 is that we
are finally planning to take our belated honeymoon to Ireland. Aww yeah. That
alone makes not moving a little sweeter.

Beyond that, the real plan is to make as much money from the
shop and our writing as humanly possible so that in 2015, after the snows melt
and while the air is still cool enough for a long road trip to be pleasant, we
head west. For reals this time.